Mobile telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable media players, personal video cameras network-enabled devices are increasing in number and popularity. Many of the users of these client devices wish to download media content from network attached storage (NAS) devices to whichever device they have available at the time. The heterogeneous nature of the various types of client devices and preferences typically require different media formats for such content. For example, depending on the available memory or audio/visual resolution capability of devices, different formats for audio and video (H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, JPEG, etc.) content may be necessary, with each device supporting a specific format or set of formats. NAS-stored content may not be in a desired format for a particular device, and thus data sent to the client devices is transcoded from stored form into the desired formats. In most instances users manually negotiate media format selection from a NAS, with the user of the client device inputting media format selection and transcoding information via graphical or command line interface on the client device, and the NAS processing the media format selection instructions.
As the number of client devices seeking downloadable media content increases in a shared network environment, each NAS communicating with the devices must commit an increasing amount of processor and memory resources to handling media format selection requests from the client devices. The increasing volume of requests slows down and otherwise interferes with file storage and retrieval operations that the NAS performs. This problem can be partly alleviated using conventional load balancing and content management provided by independent servers. However, negotiating manual selection of desired media formats by increasing numbers of client devices is not a scalable operation and can potentially become intractable. There is accordingly a need for a NAS system and method that allows faster and easier selection of media formats for delivery of media content to client devices. The invention disclosed herein satisfies this need, as well as others.